Chinese Intelligence Operation ‘Likely’ Targets Federal Workers Laid Off By Trump Admin, Report Alleges
Chinese intelligence has “likely” been trying to recruit federal workers who were laid off by President Donald Trump’s administration, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) alleged Friday. A report by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank found job listings targeted to these former employees by companies and websites that appeared to have links to a Chinese intelligence operation.FDD alleged that five companies in particular — Smiao Intelligence, Dustrategy, RiverMerge Strategies, Tsubasa Insight and Wavemax Innov — used the same Chinese-owned server for website hosting. FDD employed a technique called passive DNS to trace the connections between these companies’ websites and the server hosting them via an IP address linking them, according to the report. (RELATED: Students Reportedly Uncover Chinese Espionage At Top California University) FDD Uncovers Likely Chinese Intelligence Operation Targeting Recently Laid-Off U.S. Government Employees NEW memo by @FDD_CCTI‘s Max Lesser:https://t.co/tewuShAlcu — FDD (@FDD) May 16, 2025 Evidence suggests that Smiao Intelligence has been operating out of China, according to the FDD. The website ended in .cn, a top-level Chinese domain, and it is the oldest of the five, the report found. While Dustrategy, RiverMerge Strategies, Tsubasa Insights and Wavemax Innov described themselves as being based in Japan, Singapore and the United States, the FDD claimed there is reason to believe otherwise. These four entities either used or previously used the same Chinese email provider chengmail[.]com, share a single SSL certificate, which acts a website’s identity card and allows for secure communication with visitors, according to the report. Only one of the companies, Smiao Intelligence, appears real with the rest being “little more than digital facades, a conclusion apparent from their use of cloned websites, fake customers, AI-generated text, and other signs of artificiality,” the FDD found. The think tank alleged that Dustrategy, Tusbasa Insights and Wave Innox have engaged in the partial cloning of the sites of real business entities. “This common behavior strengthens the assessment that a single entity created them, likely having cloned legitimate websites as a shortcut to avoid building a new website from scratch,” the report said. Based on this assessment, the FDD alleged that associates of Smiao Intelligence “likely” created these four other dubious companies for intelligence purposes.